And suddenly, he realized that she was also keyed up. Her voice was steady and her eyes had their same usual coldness, but something in the way she stood was different. When Visotski placed the mask on the Sudanese’s face, Eitan turned to her, intending to suggest that she leave. In another minute there would be some unpleasant sights here. But when he looked over at her, he saw that she was far from being frightened. She looked at the Sudanese with fascination, her lips slightly open with childlike wonder. When the surgical scissors pierced the Sudanese’s skin, he looked up and studied Sirkit again. If she was planning to faint, she should do it now. But Sirkit showed no intention of fainting. She observed the incision with such interest that it was doubtful she had seen Eitan look at her.
“Scalpel.”
At first, she didn’t react. Perhaps she thought he was talking to Visotski. But a few seconds later, she looked up and her glance met the doctor’s. Gray eyes and black eyes. She handed him the scalpel. He didn’t say thank you, didn’t even nod, but from that moment on, through all the hours that followed, he treated her the way he treated every operating-room nurse.
*
And in the midst of all that, the humiliation of the desire.
(But him, of all people? Him? Didn’t she understand how much that desire humiliated her? How could she even think that she would want him, and how could she still be the dishrag she had been. Still pathetic. Even though she had freedom, she still chose the ridiculous, humiliating thing. Humiliating humiliating humiliating. She didn’t pay attention for one minute, and a new weakness snuck inside her, as if the ones she had were not enough. And much more than the humiliation of the attraction itself, the reason for it was humiliating, the truth of that desire. And the truth was that she owed everything she had to this man and his SUV. Owed everything to someone else’s bad luck. She had received her life as a gift from someone who had never intended to give it to her. How could she not want him for that. How could she not hate him for that.)
He didn’t think about her on the way home. The SUV raced along the asphalt and he didn’t think about her. He thought about the patient, about the operation, about how easily it could have ended differently. A wave of adrenaline surged through his body, and he didn’t think about her. He thought about death and how he had managed to beat the crap out of it today. He thought about Prof. Zakai and the expression he would certainly have had on his face if he had seen that operation. At first, everything looked simple, they removed the spleen without difficulty, but then… what a mess. Visotski thought the Sudanese was a goner. He saw it with his own eyes. Eitan also thought that the Sudanese was a goner. No makeshift hospital could handle that amount of abdominal bleeding, and certainly not if the chief surgeon was a neurosurgeon, an expert in opening brains who hadn’t touched a person’s abdomen in more than a decade. When the bleeding continued after the splenectomy, it was already clear that it was over, that man was going to die and all the IV fluids in the world couldn’t help. Then suddenly he had the idea to dissect, to look for the source of the bleeding in the lower branches of the splenic artery. It took half an hour but he found that bleeding branch and tied it off. Even Zakai himself might have failed here. For a moment, he was sorry he couldn’t tell him. In fact, he couldn’t tell anyone. The most glorious moment in his career, the moment that made studying medicine worthwhile. An operation that didn’t happen on a patient who didn’t exist. And maybe it was better that way. Because even the secret had a taste of its own: a pleasurable sweet bitterness that was still on his tongue when he went into the house. He wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened in the garage that night. An adult’s pride and a child’s joy, both would remain inside him, behind sealed lips. But even if his lips could not speak, they could still find other ways to express that bitter sweetness. He leaned over Liat and kissed her as she slept, moving his tongue along her soft neck. She opened her sleepy, surprised eyes. It had been years since he’d woken her up to fuck. And he surprised himself as well, but only momentarily, because the next moment he shook off the surprise and attacked her soft, round breasts, her nipples hardening under his hand. At first, she drew back. The hurt feelings and the anger, and more than a little bitterness were still there, in bed with them. But his passion was so great and so infectious that cold remoteness seemed like a total waste. Liat and Eitan held each other, their fingers spread, their legs intertwined, in their peaceful bedroom in Omer, behind shuttered eyes.
(He didn’t think about her smell wafting toward him when she bent over the patient. Didn’t think about the sigh she would utter at the moment of penetration, when he would finally know her from the inside, and even then, wouldn’t know her enough.)
Sadness always waited for her at the far edge of her orgasm. One minute all was sweetness, and the next everything was spoiled. Her husband was between her thighs, heavy and sticky, and suddenly she was acutely aware of the uncomfortable angle of his head on her shoulder. She was still breathing heavily, erratically, but the heat that had been flowing through her body a moment ago vanished and the coldness of the air began to be palpable. Once again it wasn’t clear who had been moaning a moment ago, bent under the weight of enormous, inconceivable fullness. And the words she had whispered to him hoarsely were now embarrassing, hanging in the air. She got up, turned on the light and went into the bathroom. He stayed in bed, eyes closed, a self-satisfied half-smile on his lips. How much gentleness there was in the way he lay there. How much confidence. A few minutes later he joined her, still fuzzy, and kissed her on the lips with a mouth that was all body. All the kisses and licking and tasting of her were returned to her in that kiss, from his mouth to hers. Meanwhile, she washed between her legs where it was sometimes sticky and sometimes slightly painful. She said it was great, because it truly had been. But she didn’t say that it had made her sad as well because what could he actually do with that information. He washed himself quickly and told her that her body was one immense amusement park. He’d been telling her that for years, and for years she’d smiled. Then he took a towel and went out, leaving her to wash his semen from between her thighs and her sadness from her chest.
*
Sirkit knew that it was all because the sun rose on the wrong side here, came from the desert and fell into the water. Sun should come from the water, clean. When the sun comes to you from the sand, your days are never really clean. There, in the village, the men used to get up before dawn to go fishing, and the women went with them because a person can’t enter something big like the sea in something small like a boat without a pair of eyes watching him from the land. The men and the women would go down to the shore together, not talking much, because at that time of day every word that hits the air is like the beat of a drum. Not long after that, the sun would come from where it was supposed to come from: the sea, red and beautiful, like a baby coming from the womb. When they saw it come out like that, the men and women felt clean and new, as if they themselves were born from the sea. And they began the day like that, clean and new. But here, in this country, the sun comes out of the land, dirty and dusty. On their knees, bent over the cartons in Davidson’s storeroom, the workers lifted their heads when it rose, looked at it for a moment and saw that it was dirty like them, filthy with dust and mud and tired even before seven in the morning.
At 5:30 in the morning, on her knees in the storeroom, she thought about her captive doctor, trying to guess how he slept. On which side of the bed, for example. And what he wore, if anything. Hugging his wife or not hugging her, and if he did hug her – did he do it because he wanted to or out of force of habit? She thought about the sheets, amusing herself with thoughts of red satin versus white cotton, in the end going with the cotton, because satin was definitely too sensuous for him, too erotic. And she was already drawing a small circle of saliva on the pillow, a masculine arm flung across the mattress, quiet, calm breathing. Did he dream or not? And if so – what about?
That’s enough, she said to herself as she straightened up,
moving on to the next carton. She had neither the intention nor the ability to guess the dreams of the white man lying on the white cotton sheets in his whitewashed home in Omer.
And suddenly she wanted him to wake up, wanted to throw him out of bed. Yank the pillow with the small, innocent circle of saliva on it from under his head. Grab the limp hand and give it a good shaking. Bend over his head, the hair dotted with its first flowering of gray, and scream her lungs out. Or maybe she’d do the opposite, slip as quietly as the sunset into the narrow space between him and his wife. Smell the cotton sheets. Her. Him. Wallow in the mud of their dreams. The sun rose out of the dust and Sirkit bent over the cartons, all the while screaming, raging, hugging and moaning in the peaceful bedroom in Omer.
PART TWO
1
ONLY AFTER SHE STEPPED OUT of the cruiser did she think that maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to come here alone. In less than five minutes, fifteen people had gathered around her, most of them young men. Other eyes, female eyes, peered at her from the tin shacks. A dog barked loudly. She couldn’t tell if the barking was directed at her or simply a general statement to the world. Either way it stopped when one of the young men picked up a stone and threw it at the dog’s head. That calmed her down, because the barking had begun to be really frightening. But it also worried her to see the dark-skinned fist close around the stone, throw it and hit its target.
She was dying to put her hand on the butt of her gun, but forced herself to walk with her hands hanging loosely at her sides. What was she actually doing here? She was completely blinded, but didn’t want to rummage around in her bag for her sunglasses. Maybe she could turn around. Drive to the precinct. Turn her head away when she passed the kid’s cell. He didn’t look when she walked by anyway. Kept his brown eyes glued to the floor as if he found the dead roaches lying on it the most interesting things in the world. Yesterday, she’d tried to ask him about his confession and he hadn’t said a word, but his hand had moved instinctively to his broken thumb. He pulled it away a second later, but she had managed to see it, and he knew she had. Her grandmother always used to tell her not to get it wrong – you should never pay too much attention to what people tell you with their mouths. It’s their bodies that tell you everything you need to know. But what would her grandmother say about a Bedouin kid who hadn’t said a word for a day and a half already, and his body was, on the one hand, as slight as a bird’s, and on the other, hard, really hard, with those bristles, that veiled look.
She looked at the faces of young men around her and said to herself that they looked like him. Brothers, or cousins. Or maybe it was just that they all looked alike with their faded clothes, bristles, hooded eyes. Maybe the similarity she saw among them said more about her than it did about them. Because now, glancing at them again, she realized that they were looking at her more with curiosity than with animosity. And when she maintained eye contact long enough, one of them even smiled at her, and the kid next to him broke the silence, saying, “Ahalan,” and suddenly she heard “Ahalan” and “Salam alaikum” coming from every direction, and although she also felt a slight wave of “what-do-you-want-here” hostility, she was ashamed of herself for having been so anxious to touch her gun.
“I came to talk to the family of Ali abu Ayad.” One of the boys walked away from the group toward one of the tin shacks. Even before he reached the door, a bearded man came out and Liat understood that he had been watching from inside since the moment she’d arrived. A woman wearing a burka walked out behind him. The burka did not hide how large she was. At least 100 kilos. The man reached out to shake Liat’s hand. His was a rough hand with a Rolex on the wrist that Liat avoided looking at so she wouldn’t have to wonder how he had come by it. “Shalom, we are Ali’s parents.” The Hebrew came easily to him, unlike his son.
“Do you know that he has been arrested for stealing a car?”
Once again she thought she shouldn’t have come here alone, and this time the hostile noises coming from the young men around her only reinforced that thought. But the bearded man continued to smile as he replied, “We know, but it wasn’t Ali. Our boy is as good as gold, thank God.” The “thank God” was spoken a bit more loudly. The words gleamed above the dusty ground. Defiant, incongruous, like the Rolex on his calloused hand.
“I’m less concerned about the car at the moment,” she said, and explained that she was more worried about the fact that the boy had confessed to running over and killing a man two weeks earlier, near Tlalim.
The bearded man stopped smiling. The woman behind him froze. When she spoke behind her burka, Liat was surprised by the contrast between the black sack of coal standing in front of her and the delicate voice that emerged from it. “Ali did not do that.”
Liat looked into the woman’s eyes. “I’m looking for someone who was in the car that night to give evidence.” The air filled with muttering in Arabic. The young men whispered to each other. Those who understood translated for those who didn’t, and those who thought they didn’t understand asked in order to confirm that they actually did, and the commotion grew louder from moment to moment – until it stopped all at once. One minute they were all talking, and suddenly they were silent. There was no mistaking that silence. Once again, she wanted to place her hand on the butt of her gun, and once again she forced herself not to. The woman in the burka spoke again, her delicate voice resonating among the tin shacks. “We don’t know who was with him, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he didn’t do it.”
“He himself said he did it. Maybe he said it so we wouldn’t try to find the other thief. I don’t know. But it would help him a lot if the person who was there came to the station with me.”
There was another flood of murmuring in Arabic, this time even stronger. More and more young men were gathering around in a circle. Behind them, women were coming out of the shacks, faces covered, wrapped in burkas, and beside them young girls in faded skirts and long-sleeved blouses despite the heat. A barefoot toddler of about three ran to the center of the circle with a cry of joy, delighted with the attention. He held a bag of peanut-flavor snacks in his hand and continued to clutch it when his mother swooped him up and scolded him. The voices died down slowly until all was silent again. Liat scanned the young men’s faces, searching for a trembling lip, frightened eyes, an attempt to flee. Instead, she found quiet, blazing anger.
Finally, the bearded man spoke again. Not to Liat, but to the young men. He spoke and looked at their faces, his glance moving from one to the other, lingering on each of them. When he finished, his wife spoke again, her delicate voice rising and falling in what Liat suddenly realized was actually weeping. The woman was crying behind her veil. You couldn’t see the tears, but tremors shook her entire body and her voice broke in the middle of a sentence. The boys looked at the bearded man and his sobbing wife, some surprised, some sad. But none of them uttered a sound. None of them stepped forward and said “It was me.”
And then a young girl did. At first, no one realized that she had done it, that she had stepped forward. It seemed as if she might be looking for her little brother, to admonish him to come home. But she stood in front of Liat and said, “It was me.” Then everything happened very quickly. The bearded man opened a pair of bewildered eyes, not understanding. His wife, however, understood immediately; it was her wails of sorrow that made it clear to Liat that she had to get the hell out of there. The young men were still standing there watching the goings-on, but some of the older ones had already taken out cell phones and were punching in numbers, maybe trying to reach their fathers. Liat told the girl to come with her and headed for the car. Her biggest fear was that the girl would begin to run. When you run, people understand that they’re supposed to chase you. But the girl walked slowly, almost too slowly. As if now that she had revealed her secret, she no longer had the strength for anything else. Liat opened the door for her and started the car. In a few seconds, the cluster of tin shacks had disappeared. She breathe
d a sigh of relief when they turned off the dusty dirt road onto the asphalt road leading to Beersheba.
“He won’t look at me, that kid. I’m telling you Tani, he won’t talk to me. If I hadn’t gone to his village, he’d be spending the rest of his life in prison, but he still doesn’t get that. He’s angry at me for exposing their romance. Would he rather be convicted of manslaughter? And his girlfriend, Mona, she’s really kind of sweet. I asked them to let her sit in his cell with him for a little while, and they kissed when they thought I couldn’t see. Then Cheetah threw her out – he’s still pissed off at me. He should thank me for not digging into that business of the broken finger. It’s very convenient for everyone to think that the kid confessed in order to protect her, but if all he wanted was to hide his relationship with Mona from his family, it was enough just to keep quiet about who was with him. He didn’t confess because of her, he confessed because Cheetah hit him. Probably threatened him, too. But the minute she showed up, it was clear that the confession was a load of crap. He didn’t even go there that night to steal a car, he just wanted to fool around with his girlfriend in peace. And the alibi she gave him was foolproof, a good story the way only a true story can be. It seems they weren’t even near Tlalim when the Eritrean was run over – he took her home at two, which is when her shift at the gas station ends. And that Eritrean, he wasn’t run over until almost dawn. Can you believe how close we were to throwing someone in prison for no reason?”
Yes, he believed it. He slowly sipped the tea with the lemongrass Liat had picked from the garden, and he believed it. And as he sipped, he asked himself – what if that Mona hadn’t stepped forward. If she hadn’t said that he didn’t run over anyone, she was with him. At what point would he himself have stepped forward? When would he have gone to the lead detective, who just happened to be his wife, and told her that they had to talk? No, not about the mortgage. And not about the kid Yaheli bit in nursery school. Something else.
Waking Lions Page 13